Authoritarian Planning

This new paper from Gareth Fearn and Simin Davoudi has been published and is available for Open Access

In this newly published paper Gareth Fearn and Simin Davoudi argue that the English planning system faces a crisis of legitimacy following the breakdown of 'third way' politics, and is slowly undergoing an authoritarian turn. 

Gareth says, "We draw upon my PhD research into shale gas fracking in England, to show how previously dominant, depoliticising practices of compromise and consensus seeking, are increasingly complemented or replaced by practices that aim to discipline, control, and exclude opponents of shale. As part of a wider authoritarian turn in neoliberal states, these practices have crept into planning through changes in legislation, reconfiguration of rules, rescaling of decision-making, and shrinking of democratic spaces. In particular, the turn is highly reactionary, each step a response to the success of the anti-fracking movement in mobilising resistance to increasingly unpopular proposals which threatened communities and the decarbonising energy. We show how recent planning and state reforms continue the tendencies in the fracking case: centralisation/removing local power, crackdowns on protests, removal of judicial review and ramping up antagonistic rhetoric. The fracking case provides an example of a movement successful in winning against the power of the state and capital, subsequent reforms show the state are trying to make sure this doesn't happen again, by closing even further the space for democratic dissent (hence: authoritarian).